Old Age: Consoling Hopes

Some of those devoted friends had fallen as shahīds, while others had passed away as spiritual shahīds amid those calamitous events. I could not restrain my tears.

I climbed to the summit of the citadel, rising some two minarets above the site of my madrasa, and sat overlooking the place where it had once stood. There, in thought, I returned to the days of seven or eight years before. My imagination was so vivid that I remained absorbed in those memories for a long time.

I was entirely alone. There was no one beside me to draw me away from those recollections or bring me back from that vanished time. Only seven or eight years had passed, yet whenever I opened my eyes and looked about me, the changes were so immense that I felt as though a whole century had elapsed.

The entire neighbourhood surrounding my madrasa, in the city beneath the citadel, had been burned and laid waste. As I gazed upon that desolation, I felt as though I had returned to the world after two hundred years and was surveying it with sorrowful eyes.

Most of those who had lived in the surrounding houses were my friends and acquaintances. The majority had perished in exile, wasting away far from their homes. May Allah have mercy upon them. Moreover, apart from the Armenian quarter, all the Muslim houses in Van had been destroyed.

My heart was torn with grief. I was so profoundly affected that, had I possessed a thousand eyes, they would all have wept together.

I had imagined that by returning from exile to my homeland, I would escape the pain of estrangement. Alas, it was in my own homeland that I encountered estrangement in its most terrible form.

I saw that hundreds of students and friends to whom my soul had been deeply attached—like Abdurrahman, whom I mentioned in the Twelfth Hope—now lay in their graves, while the places where they had once lived had become ruins.

There was a saying I had long remembered without fully comprehending its meaning. Now, confronted by this sorrowful spectacle, I understood its deepest significance. The saying was:

لَوْلاَ مُفَارَقَةُ اْلاَحْبَابِ مَا وَجَدَتْ لَهَا الْمُنَايَا ِالٰۤى اَرْوَاحِنَا سُبُلاً

Were it not for separation from loved ones, death would find no path to our souls.

Indeed, it is separation from loved ones that wounds and consumes the human soul most deeply. Nothing had ever affected me so profoundly or caused me to weep so bitterly as that experience. Had consolation and assistance not come to me through īmān and the Qur’an, that suffering and grief would almost have overwhelmed my soul.

From ancient times, poets have lamented in their verses the ruins of places where they once gathered with beloved companions. I had now witnessed with my own eyes the most heartrending example of such desolation.